httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J4O2-nsFBA

“Subterranean Homesick Blues,” rendered in one of the first great proto-videos. (Yes, that’s Alan Ginsberg animatedly in conversation in the background.)

Frye has a few things to say about Dylan, but this is especially high praise to offer up for his 70th birthday:

Oh, I think Bob Dylan is a poet.  I am quite interested in the folk-song idiom as a poetic idiom.  It’s a revival of an oral tradition in poetry which disappeared for centuries.  Poetry got too badly bogged down with books, and I think it’s a very healthy thing when poetry becomes something that can be recited to an audience with a musical background.  (CW 24, 474)